SB Recommends Game Boy Advance Games

Nintendo's nearly-as-popular successor to the Game Boy, with graphics comparable to the SNES. There were three very different hardware versions released, each with distinct advantages and disadvantages. It can link up to the Nintendo GameCube as a secondary display, and there are actually quite a few games that utilized this heavily. GBA games will play on the Gamecube (via the Game Boy Player peripheral) DS and DS Lite, but not the DSi.

There is a bulky add-on called the E-Reader, which could load data off (something like) bar codes. It's used to transmit Animal Crossing items from cards, play NES ports (that have to be loaded from multiple cards), and bonus Super Mario Bros. 3 levels. Nothing original other than a few minigames ever came out for it.

Ebay is plagued by GBA cartridge piracy. If it's unboxed (especially if they offer to send the box flattened/unmade), and sounds too-cheap-to-be-true, avoid it. They tend to have poor batteries that won't keep your save data for long.

• Advance Guardian Heroes
  • Sniper Honeyviper: Amazingly solid belt-scroll beatemup with fairly heavy RPG elements, significant possibilities for combos and the ability to play as literally every enemy and boss character in the game. Shame about the muddy graphics, though.
  • sawtooth: Advance Guardian Heroes is alright but I didn't find it very compelling at all. I couldn't be bothered to work out difficult timing when I'm being swarmed by enemies on a tiny screen.
  • The Blueberry Hill: My favourite of Treasure's pre-Bangaio GBA output. The countering is what makes it: feels really solid, and tangible.

• Advance Wars / Game Boy Wars Advance (JP) (also on: Wii U VC)
  • The Blueberry Hill: It's still my favourite Advance Wars game. Later entries can feel a bit cluttered, with too-many unit types. The second GBA game is worth picking up too, if you need more of the series.

• Astro Boy: The Omega Factor
  • sawtooth: Astro Boy is a masterpiece and charming as hell to boot (and the difficulty is pretty well-balanced on normal difficulty). The story doesn't really become clever until the second time around, and the actual structure of the game changes drastically. On the whole, the game deserves credit for weaving stage selection into the actual narrative, and while its themes aren't terribly profound in this day and age they're handled pretty well.
  • The Blueberry Hill: There are some wonderful moments, but most fighting is too tedious and repetitive.
  • Koji: has to be my number one game for the platform, it's pretty much perfect, especially if you're into beat'em ups, but in general as an action game.
  • spectralsound: the Artificial Sun and the ending boss rush are pretty ridiculous. some great Tezuka nostalgia, though.

• Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow / Castlevania: Akatsuki no Menuett (JP) (also on: Wii U VC) - forum thread
  • Rudie: Thought of as the closest to Symphony of the Night. Takes place in the future, but there is almost nothing interesting done with that concept.
  • Sniper Honeyviper: I beat it in five hours and never felt compelled to pick it up again. Some people really got addicted to soul farming though. As diplo has said, the castle is very “comfy.”
  • dementia: The Double Pack featuring [Harmony of Dissonance] & [Aria of Sorrow] is mercifully easier to find than AoS alone. Buy that.

• Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (NA) / Castlevania (PAL) / Akumajo Dracula Circle of the Moon (JP) (also on: Wii U VC) - forum thread forum thread
  • Rudie: The only recent Castlevania not done by Iga. Enemies and screens actually have some thought put into them.
  • Chris B: I do prefer the first GBA Castlevania (Circle of the Moon). Kinda felt like the Richter Belmont mode of Symphony of the Night done right and thanks to higher difficulty and less collectables this one didn't feel quite like such a grindy timewaster as most of the other metrovanias either.
  • spectralsound: the only post-Symphony Castlevania i can stand. Iga's non-involvement might have something to do with that. there's a physicality to roaming the game's castle that all the other Igavanias seem to lack.
  • Ni Go Zero Ichi: This is the only SotN-like, including SotN itself, that really feels like it marries the classic Castlevanias' grueling struggle to gain ground with SotN's sense of exploration, and manages to stay that way for most of its running time without handing the player some blatantly game-breaking weapon/ability at some point. It's good.

• Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance / Castlevania: Byakuya no Concerto (JP) (also on: Wii U VC) - forum thread
  • Rudie: It's interesting. I really like the music.
  • Ni Go Zero Ichi: Easily the dullest and most forgettable of the Igavanias, moreso even than Portrait of Ruin. Hard to recommend if you haven't already played all the others.

• CIMA: The enemy
  • Leau: Kind of rare, but worth it if you can find it. One of my favorite GBA games. You need to lead a party of settlers through this demon world. They all have different abilities and all are playable. Feels a bit like Zelda, and has lots of personality. Spotty hit detection though.

• Digidrive
  • firenze: Digidrive [is] all kinds of fantastic and one of the best games on any system in 2006. Part of Nintendo's BitGenerations line, and arguably the best game of the bunch.
  • Broco: It has an intense, poker-like fold-or-keep-upping-the-stakes dynamic, great music, and quite simply I find it awesome just how incredibly abstract the whole thing is. People watching you play have no idea what's going on, and I find it impossible to talk about the game without getting into a terminology tangle because there is no obvious name to give to any of the elements. There's nothing quite like it.

• DK: King of Swing / Swinging Donkey (JP) (also on: Wii U VC)
  • Leau: Tough to explain. You use the L and R buttons to control DK's hands, and swing from peg to peg over huge, intelligently designed levels. The highlight being, swinging to the top of a tornado on various pieces of debris. Honestly, much more fun than I'm making it sound.
  • Koji: Tight as a game can get, with one of the most original means of control in the genre, and just plain fun from beginning to end (well, it actually picks up a couple of stages into the game.)

• Double Dragon Advance
  • belthegor: Double Dragon Advance is the best game in the series, as far as I'm concerned.

• Drill Dozer / Screw Breaker (JP)
  • showka: a great, classical platforming game with some really interesting mechanics. The rumble gimmick is put to surprisingly good use and I can't imagine playing the game without it.
  • Koji: The game starts off pretty boring, but luckily it gets interesting down the road, as its level design gets trickier. The bosses are all fun to fight, too, and you pretty much have one per stage. Some stages and bosses even reminded me a bit of Astro Boy: Omega Factor (which is a very good thing,) though obviously not as hard. Hm, in fact, the game feels very inspired by that beat'em up style, with regular enemies that actually take some work to defeat and scenes where you get swarmed by cannon fodder enemies, plus clunkier-than-usual controls.
  • TORUMASUTA: Drill Dozer is the only sidescroller since Yoshi's Island to make me go “Wow, this is a genuinely good sidescroller; I don't like it just because it's an entry in a dead genre I love.
  • Mr Peckerston: Unfortunately there's not much variety in Drill Dozer's enemy design; the late stages of the game tend to focus on adding new objects to make a bunch of “how do I get there?” puzzles. There's more plot later on too, but I wouldn't exactly call it 'fleshed out'.
  • spinach: […] it's got this definite MegaMan feel to it, but the drill introduces something entirely new to the table and it's pretty great.

• Drome Racers
  • glitch: If flat-shaded polygons give you warm fuzzy feelings, get this. closest thing to Stunt Race FX on the system, including sluggish controls and awkward collision detection, but now with a decent frame-rate. starts out trivially easy and takes too long to get moderately difficult, but once it does it's challenging enough. one I always keep close to my GBA to pull out for a quick-race or 2. Or 5.

The Famicom Mini series is a line of 30 Famicom, and Famicom Disk System, ports released to commemorate the Famicom's 20th anniversary. A similar, smaller, series was released outside Japan (as the Classic NES Series in North America, and NES Classics in PAL territories), but their ports are based on the NES releases. So no FDS Metroid, and Kid Icarus.
A few of the FDS ports are worth picking up, mostly for the better sound, no disk-swapping or load times, and the use of on-cart saves, instead of passwords.

• Kid Icarus / Hikari Shinwa: Parutena no Kagami (JP) (also on: NES; FDS)

• Metroid (also on: NES; FDS)

• Nazo no Murasame Jou (also on: FDS)
  • NeoZeedeater: A light-hearted overhead action samurai game with catchy music.
  • Laurel Soup: I've been on a big Nazo no Murasamejō kick lately. It's the Kid Icarus to Zelda's Metroid if that makes sense. It's top down context-based sword or shuriken craziness plus a button that makes you invisible sometimes for some reason. The bosses are pretty hellish.
  • dessgeega: I like to think of Murasamejou as Legend of Kage in Legend of Zelda's world map. the GBA version is the NO LOADING TIMES version.

• Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls / Final Fantasy I + II Advance (JP)
  • Ymer: Final Fantasy 1: Dawn of Souls compilation for the GBA with the Mod of Balance patch applied seems to be so far everything I ever wanted of a turn-based JRPG's combat.

• Final Fantasy V Advance
  • gatotsu2501: The highly amusing localization in this version of the game makes it the definitive one in my book, despite the degraded sound quality that it shares with the other GBA Final Fantasy ports. The bonus dungeon and extra Jobs will probably entertain players who get really into the character-twinking aspect too.
  • Felix: I don't feel right playing any version of FFV that isn't a patched ROM from 1997 in ZSNES. That was a big deal.

• Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
  • Ni Go Zero Ichi: Once you get over the fact that it's not Final Fantasy Tactics, this is actually a great game. It's not very challenging (which is regrettable, considering how deep the customization system is) but the long and winding road to building the ultimate clan of invincible demigod-warriors is quite a gratifying one. The story also turns out to be better than you might initially expect.
  • Felix: I feel like it's become a little too fashionable to defend this game after it initially got a lukewarm reception for deviating from the original's presentation so significantly as part of Square's abortive FFXII Ivalice franchising efforts. While it's true that the narrative is a lot more inspired than it gets credit for, the game isn't really that much fun to play; it seems like it's been aggressively balanced to the point of the combat having no real swing or zip to it.

• Fire Emblem / Fire Emblem Rekka no Ken (JP) (also on: Wii U VC)

• Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (also on: 3DS VC (limited), Wii U VC)
  • gatotsu2501: A more forgiving (some might say compromised) Fire Emblem, with grinding and weapon/item shops available in between battles. It's still Fire Emblem to the core, though.

• Fire Pro Wrestling
  • Loki Laufeyson: The western version has all the wrestlers in the two american companies pallette swapped as well as renamed, which is a minor annoyance. There also aren't many match types. But it's still a portable Fire Pro game, and it's a lot easier to find than the sequel.

• Godzilla Domination
  • Loki Laufeyson: It's a lot like SNK's King of the Monsters games, but faster, without the wrestling element and most importantly, it has actual licensed Toho monsters in it. Plus it looks really nice.

• Golden Sun (also on: Wii U VC)
  • Felix: This is a jRPG with random battles, pre-rendered sprites, lots of block-pushing puzzles, and atavistic-even-for-its-time design decisions like your characters failing to autotarget another available enemy if the one they elected to attack is killed before their turn comes up. It's also really polished and nicely generic (or, I suppose one might say “Bravely Default”). I'm sure I wouldn't play it today, but if you have any affection for thoroughgoing four-elements save-the-world fare, it's probably more evocative of The Last Airbender than anything Square ever did, and it's hard to fault on its own terms. The sequel was a little overlong and uneven, almost as though they planned to have a third instalment but packed it into two at the last minute, though it does have Suikoden 2-style save importing, which was a feat on the Gameboy. They finally did make a third game years later on the DS though I hear it's pretty joyless, which isn't hard to believe, given how borderline this one could be said to be.
  • Ni Go Zero Ichi: A game that tends to get pretty overrated by fans. It was a decent JRPG with above-average production values released during a time when the genre was in high demand and there were few available alternatives on the GBA. Today I doubt there's much that would make it stand out.

• Golden Sun: The Lost Age (also on: Wii U VC)

• Guru Logic Champ (also on: DSi (as Snapdots))
  • The Blueberry Hill: A charmingly presented puzzle game from Champ Team¹⁾, and Compile. The puzzles are logic based, and solved by rotating the playfield and moving/removing blocks to form a picture. The game bursts with sass, and life, but is, unfortunately, now quite a rare thing.

• Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town
  • villain: This is a sort of enhanced port of the PlayStation's Harvest Moon: Back to Nature. There's some bonus content that you can access via connecting to Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life for the GameCube including records that will play music from the older games (Harvest Moon 64, most importantly!), and you can marry a goddess. Unfortunately, this game is plagued with bugs, translation issues, and the controls aren't great, but it's good fun and probably one of the best entry points into the series. There's also More Friends of Mineral Town, which lets you play as a girl and marry the guys in town (including a Kappa!).

• Hatena Satena
  • Booter: Hudson puzzle game, essentially a Picross variant. was pretty into it for a few weeks. Super Lovers art direction. You owe it to yourself to try it if you liked Picross. Japanese not necessary.
  • The Blueberry Hill: This interesting Nonogame-slash-Mine Sweeper-clone is recommended with a caveat: there is a lot of stupid text to wade through in the story mode. I'd avoid it if you don't have convenient access to a fast forward key.

• Invader
  • glitch: Pretty amazing vertical shmup, nice music, 2-player co-op (if you have 2 copies and a cable), elaborate weapon system, frustrating as hell and hard. love it. Possibly euro only.

• Kuru Kuru Kururin
  • Koji: more enjoyable to me over the sequel, Paradise, because of its simpler controls that result in gameplay that's more methodical rather than hectic.
  • Grengz: easily my favourite game on the system. The time attack element of the game is incredibly addictive. Kururin Paradise is nice in a 'more please' sense but it's no way as enjoyable as the original.
  • Deets: Guide a constantly rotating stick through a series of overhead-view mazes without scraping the walls. There's a lot of finesse to be squeezed out of the simple controls, and I find myself subconsciously comparing it to games like Cameltry and Umihara Kawase — a good thing! It's classy as hell, perfect for short play sessions.

• Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (also on: Wii U VC)
  • spectralsound: The perfect midpoint between Paper Mario and Super Mario RPG, with nice setpieces and a pretty funny script. “Hey, it's Mario! And… that green guy!”
  • gatotsu2501: Did not like this one for whatever reason. I found it ugly and repetitive and not that funny. I vastly prefer SMRPG and especially Paper Mario.
  • Felix: agreed that it's a lot more cloying than Paper Mario, and this series pretty much got worse as it went on.

• Mario Vs. Donkey Kong (also on: 3DS VC (limited))
  • gatotsu2501: A fun little puzzle-platformer. Think Lost Vikings/Braid crossed with Donkey Kong Jr. and New Super Mario Bros. and you're halfway there.

• Mega Man Battle Network / Battle Network Rockman EXE (JP) (also on: Wii U VC)
  • parkbench: I thought Megaman Battle Network (Rockman.exe in Japan…such a cooler name) was pretty clever—I never played the second one, but I can believe that it is the best in the series. Still, the first was nice despite any alleged tedium; an interesting formula that didn't devolve entirely into a card battle.
    • Torma Usuda: I wanted to think like you, but the random battles and the corridors which look exactly the same because it's THE INTERNET or whatever excuse they used to scroll new bitmaps in the background and call that a different level made it impossible. The boss battles were great, though! If they had done the game like a Pokemon game, where the random battles were avoidable and most of the time was spent battling other Navis, I could have seen myself liking this.
      But performing meaningless sidequests in all those samey corridors against all those little helmet guys on a 3×3 grid is no for what feels like 3 fucking hours at a time (though it's more like only 15 minutes of torture admittedly).
  • stotelheim: I… really like Battle Network 1? Really! The combat combined with the CCG thing is motherfucking ace.
  • Dark Age Iron Savior: I think the ideal way to enjoy the series would be to emulate the first game to get a hang of the gameplay, playing until you get sick of the confusing layout of the internet, then grabbing up two and three and enjoying them in that order. Keep in mind that the series has an absurd amount of fetchquesting, and the random battles will grate on you eventually — but the battle system is really quite great
  • Persona-sama: Yeah, I really liked Battle Network when I first played it. I thought it was a charming alternate universe to the world where robots reign supreme. Travelling through the internet and busting viruses along with your school friends and rival, it was like a fun shounen manga/anime/cartoon/episodic novel. I remember distinctly thinking, “Man, I wish one of these games would come out every year!” Then I played the second one and enjoyed it a little less and by the third game I was pretty tired of the whole thing. For some reason the charm of it wore away really fast.

• Mega Man Battle Network 2 / Battle Network Rockman EXE 2 (JP) (also on: Wii U VC)
  • EU03: I think MMBN2 was the best. It had a lot more than the first one and it also allowed for greater flexibility on making some awesome/incredibly broken combos, especially the GateMan PA.
  • Gouki: I… really enjoyed Battle Network 2. Horribly flawed but I couldn't stop going back to it.

• Mega Man Battle Network 3 / Battle Network Rockman EXE 3 (JP) (also on: Wii U VC)
  • Eudaimon: MMBN 3 was actually a good game. There's just a shitload of ways you can customize your character, and still it all manages to be balanced. Every chip, program, and style is in some way viable if you utilize it correctly, meaning that the difficulty lies not in finding the best set, but in finding the best set for the way you want to play.
    Of course, the game's tragic flaw is that it still tries to be an RPG in many ways. The pacing is a little slow, and the story is too bland to deserve the focus it receives. But it's still, in essence, a good game.
    Of course the rest of the Battle Network series can go to hell, although the latter games much moreso than those previous to 3.

• Metroid Fusion (also on: 3DS VC (limited), Wii U VC) - forum thread
  • firenze: Fusion is fantastic and is one of the few non-arcade games this decade that I've completed more than once. It's pretty linear, but also pretty awesome.
  • spectralsound: Dense, tight and dripping with tension. This was probably the closest Nintendo ever got to making Metroid a straight-up Alien game.
    • spectralsound: (I don't really care for Fusion anymore—I prefer Metroid II these days—but I'm keeping my old recommendation up because Fusion is still a weirdly underappreciated little game. The SA-X sequences are still great, too.)

• Metroid: Zero Mission
  • gatotsu2501: Ground-up remake of the original Metroid with mechanics and aesthetics borrowed from ”Super“ and ”Fusion“. So substantially redone that it is for all intents and purposes a different game. If anything it feels like the true sequel to Super Metroid: more mechanically refined, but not quite as good; still worthy of the Metroid name.
  • spectralsound: Zero Mission was the first Metroid game that really felt… unnecessary. It tries to be a successor to the original game and Super, but without the atmosphere, subtlety or level design heights of either. the only thing it seems to have over the games it apes is the most refined mechanics of any 2D Metroid, and even Fusion kind of got there first. The presence of the zero suit alone probably marked the beginning of the end.

• Monster Rancher Advance 2
  • villain: This is one of the most well-regarded games in the franchise. This basically takes Monster Rancher 2 and shrinks it down to the GBA. Instead of using CDs, you enter random strings of characters to generate monsters, which this game features a lot of (somewhere in the high 200s?), but there's a lot of palette swaps, unfortunately. Still, all of the depth that you got in MR2 is present in this game. Unlock your disk!

• Mother 3 - forums threads: 1, 2 (with spoilers), 3 (with spoilers)
  • Sniper Honeyviper: You know how everyone says that Final Fantasy VII “was a life-changing experience” or whatever? This game actually is that. Avoid Earthbound fan communities like the plague, though.
  • spectralsound: I can't even think about the ending without crying.

• Ninja Cop / Ninja Five-O (NA)
  • The Blueberry Hill: Tidy, precise, action game from Hudson. It feels like it was made in the 16-bit era, though the great variety of movement options may belie its vintage. One of the system's best. And it has a grappling hook!
  • Chris B: Beware of spending too much money on Ninja Five-0. While it's certainly a pretty good game, it's also a little overrated.
  • The King: Really well designed difficulty curve. The game gives you a ton of abilities, and very gradually gets you to get good at using them.
  • wasted potential: Don't believe the hype, Ninja Five-O isn't that great. I mean it's cool and all but I was expecting something like Shinobi and…it wasn't.

• Oriental Blue Ao no Tengai - translation patch
  • Deets: If you like RPGs that do not give a fuck about you and just throw you into a confusing world to figure shit out, you will probably dig Oriental Blue on some level.
    Combat is fast and well balanced, there's little to no grinding, the music's great, and you can miss entire swaths of the game based on choices you didn't even realize you were making. Chances are pretty good you'll stroll into at the endgame with a completely different party from anyone else. That said, you might also end up completely lost and have no idea how to advance the story for long periods of time, and the encounter rate is way too high for how little you need to actually fight non-boss encounters.
    The game is tonally and aesthetically not like the Far East of Eden games, which are all kind of goofy and absurdist. […] That said, one thing it absolutely does share with the other games in the series are some seriously great monster sprites (boss spoilers).

• Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
  • Ronnoc: This is a bit weird, but my favorite Game Boy Advance game is probably the first Pirates of the Caribbean one. I am the only person in the world who likes that game :(

• Puyo Pop / Minna de Puyo Puyo (JP)
  • Koji: I loved Puyo Pop for being the most approachable Puyo ever, with the most balanced and satisfying mechanics of the old games and a gentle difficulty curve.

• Rhythm Tengoku
  • Felix: It's the absolute perfect culmination of the Warioware games, rhythm games, and the GBA itself.
  • Ymer: Rhythm Tengoku and Elite Beat Agents are the most fun I've had pressing buttons when the game specifically tells me to and then saying I did a really great job doing so.
  • The Blueberry Hill: Nicely presented collection of rhythm-based mini/microgames. It's a perfect handheld game, and if I had my GBA time again it would be in the first few games I bought. It's also worth mentioning that the game being in Japanese only is not a notable obstruction.

• Riviera: The Promised Land (also on: PSP)
  • Sniper Honeyviper: Entirely menu-based JRPG where every decision made has an evenly split upside and downside, and huge implications for the rest of the game. There's a pretty blatant dating sim overtone and elements, as you're pretty much forced to “choose” one of your female party members and ignore one of the others. Could be your thing, but I just found it too stressful and unrewarding. The PSP version has anime cutscenes and more voice acting, but the GBA is playable on more platforms and with no loading times.
  • TORUMASUTA: Like a kind of RPG/interactive fiction crossover. If you read about it on websites you'll say to yourself that there is no way that could work, but it's totally natural when you start playing. You'll wonder why other games don't work like that. Screw other games!
  • rudie: Counterpoint. I despise this game on all levels. My burning hatred for it is so great I can't remember what I hated about it. I played it for 30 minutes before beginning to scream violently. I sold it the next day.
  • Ni Go Zero Ichi: Count me in the pro-Riviera camp, although the immense amount of irrevocable decisions, and by extension missed stuff, drives my inner OCD freak up the wall. Regardless, it is neat and fun and totally unique. It is also worth mentioning that the game has a pretty sweet soundtrack. The battle theme for Training mode makes the hours you inevitably spend there fly by.

• Shining Soul II
  • Dark Age Iron Savior: While the first Shining Soul game is definitely bad, the second one actually manages to be very playable despite not really changing the core gameplay. While it's still an awkward game and not “really Shining”, a lot of things changed for the better.

• Super Mario Advance series (also on: 3DS VC (limited, Yoshi's Island), Wii U VC (Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island))
  • spectralsound: four SNES-era Mario games (Super Mario 2 US & SMB3 (both in their All-Stars versions), Yoshi's Island, and Super Mario World), usually with a extra mini-game and some additional content. Yoshi's Island gets a set of six new levels and SMB3 gets eReader compatibility for power-ups and new levels. all of them have more-or-less intolerable voice samples.
  • The King: Re: The [SMB3] e-card levels. There are some great levels here. Favorites: 60 Seconds, Para Beetle Challenge, Tropical Splash, Frappe Snowland
    There's just shy of a full game worth of content (recycled bosses).
  • Felix: Yeah, the SMB3 e-Card levels are excellent, and you can find .sav files that contain all of them so they can be played in an emulator without needing an e-Reader. Other than that, the only reason to run these remakes is if you get the romhacks that disable the garbage new voice samples, and if you're running them on a platform that can handle GBA titles more easily than SNES titles (this was relevant to me when I owned a DS flashcart).

• Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis
  • Ni Go Zero Ichi: All the people who complained that Final Fantasy Tactics Advance wasn't as dark, complicated and punishing as the original FFT must not have realized that the game they wanted was already out.
  • Felix: I could sign on to that, but it's worth noting that this is similarly in the shadow of the original Tactics Ogre (which very few people in the English-speaking world had played in 2002).

• Wario Land 4 (also on: 3DS VC (limited), Wii U VC)
  • 2501: Dang but this game still looks and sounds nice almost 20 years (!!!!) later. The controls/physics feel just right (the good kind of floaty) and poking around the levels for puzzles and hidden treasure is a joy. Some of the sight gags in the animations, backgrounds and Wario’s transformations actually make me laugh. You can keep going back to the levels, Mario World-style, and discover more until you’ve completely mastered them and then run for score. This might honestly be the best 2D platformer since the 1990s.
  • cassievania: Virtual Wario Land), took all the best bits, and then still improved on it. It's more then just an impressive game, it's the result of an entire series worth of work, and each game taught the developer a lesson on how they should create Wario Land 4.

• WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! / Made In Wario (JP) (also on: 3DS VC (limited), Wii U VC)
  • gatotsu2501: Video games for the video game generation. Sure, it may be glorified “Simon Says”, but the demand for constant and increasingly split-second adaptability on the part of the player is an honest-to-god exhilarating game mechanic. Tellingly, a lot of the microgames are fun even outside of a “mix”, and are almost all designed to be able to stand alone (“mash A” games notwithstanding). In retrospect, the whole thing is also a surprisingly canny precursor to the wave of tiny, instant-gratification mobile games currently in fashion.

• WarioWare: Twisted!!
  • gatotsu2501: The gyroscope mechanic is not as annoying as you might think!

• Yggdra Union (also on: PSP)
  • gatotsu2501: An above-average Fire Emblem clone with some neat twists. Battle system is set up in such a way that you are less likely to lose a vital unit to a single lucky hit from the enemy, but still required to meticulously plot out your maneuvers - in other words, it feels more fair without actually being much less challenging. A sort of very loose spiritual successor to Riviera: The Promised Land, and like that game, it has a PSP remake (which, last time I checked, came free with the PSP version of its own spiritual successor, Knights in the Nightmare) with remixed music, added voice acting, and bonus levels.

• SB recommends Game Boy games | SB recommends Game Boy Color games - playable via backwards ompatability.
• i just got the gba micro, let's talk about gba games! - recommendations from the forums
• Help with used GBA games - budget recommendations from the forums
• [...] fan-translated Japanese GBA games! | [...] Japan-only GBA games- import recommendations from the forums
• playing gba ten years too late - 1CC/bug's GBA adventures, part 1.